


lights will guide you home

by crinklefries



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Bucky will always be Steve's home, Fix-It, Found Family, M/M, Melancholy, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Sad with a Happy Ending, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, give Steve Rogers the soft ending he deserves, more of a fill it than a fix-it, there are different kinds of love and Steve has all of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 07:21:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18686791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/pseuds/crinklefries
Summary: “Seems fucked up,” Natasha snorts. He hears her rustling on the other end and he knows that she, too, is struggling with her guilt. “To be left behind and feel guilty about it.”Steve laughs lowly, but it’s a sad, desperate, wrinkled thing. He passes a hand over his face.“What do we do, Nat?” he asks. “Where do we go from here?”There’s a silence so long he thinks Natasha’s finally fallen asleep. Then, the sound of rustling, again.“Forward, Steve,” she says, quietly. “We go forward.”or;Steve learns to heal, stays, and goes back for the ones he loves.





	lights will guide you home

**Author's Note:**

> To Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff--you deserved better.

 

_when you try your best but you don't succeed;_  
_when you get what you want but not what you need;_  
_when you feel so tired but you can't sleep;_  
_stuck in reverse_

**Reality.**

_2018._

What does it feel like—to lose everything?

He looks at the place in front of him, the person who was there. He thinks he can still see the outline of him; his shape carved into the bare air. Blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair, a metal arm that gleams under the hot Wakandan sun. There’s a breeze that moves through the trees, but it smells of sweat and blood. There’s a jolt in his chest; the space between where his heart used to be and what’s left behind.

There’s the taste of copper in his mouth, the burn of his muscles. He’s exhausted, battered, hurt. He rocks on his feet.

The air is filled with ash—he feels the dust coat his skin.

Steve drops to the ground, touches the place he just was. It used to be a person; a person he has known and lost, time and time again.

His fingers brush dust and dirt.

The sounds rush in his ears—the screams halting, soft gasps and surprised shouts; the rustle of wind through trees.

“Oh god,” Steve says.

He drops to the ground.

They lose everything. 

*

What does it feel like, knowing you’ve survived the end of the world?

He can’t sleep anymore. He thinks once, even on the worst of nights, in the middle of Italy, a lifetime or two ago, when there was blood under his fingernails and no end in sight, he would wake up in the middle of the night, time and time again, sweating and screaming dreams into the flesh of his arm.

Sometimes, it was into the flesh of someone else.

On the rare occasions they could, steal a moment for themselves, just the two of them in their bedrolls on the cold ground. Blue eyes opening in the middle of the night and a familiar hand in the blond of his hair.

“Hey,” Bucky would whisper. “It’s okay. I’m here, Steve.”

“Buck,” Steve would breathe out, voice ragged, and close his eyes, his heart stuck in his throat. “I think I’m losing my mind.”

Bucky would scoot closer, sling an arm around Steve’s suddenly large shoulders, and press a kiss into his temple.

“That’s war, sweetheart,” Bucky would says, softly, with a laugh as sad as his smile. “You can’t be here without losing your mind.”

That’s how it feels like now, except there’s no one to wake up next to him. There’s no one to hold his shoulder or frame his face.

Now, when Steve wakes up—on the occasions he manages to go to sleep at all—there’s no one to tell him he’s not losing his mind.

Now, he stays awake with the dark of his thoughts, tracing steps and retracing steps, wondering what they could have done differently, how they could have become something different. He watches the moon outside of his window until it sinks into the sky and the sun comes up instead.

Half the world is gone, but the moon still sets and the sun still rises. What does the universe care about broken hearts and missing pieces?  
  
  
Some nights, he goes running. It’s empty streets that he winds through, the former shell of a civilization long lost—or at least it feels like it. Sometimes, he’ll run into a stray cat and the grief hits him hardest then. He stumbles to a stop, just watching it disappear into an alley.

There aren’t that many cats anymore, either.  
  
  
Other nights, he picks up his phone.

“I can’t sleep,” he says.

After a moment, he hears a sigh on the other end of the line.

“Me neither,” Natasha answers. “I’ve been taking melatonin.”

“Has it helped?” Steve asks, staring at the ceiling above him. The sheets are cast to his waist, his feet wrapped in the blanket near the bottom.

“No,” Natasha laughs lowly. “Nothing helps.”

How do you deal with grief, when you don’t have the space for it?

“Survivor’s guilt,” Steve says into the quiet night air. “That’s what Sam called it. Back when—”

The words dry up in his throat. They often do, these days. He wants to say their names as often as possible, like a mantra on his tongue. _Sam. T’Challa. Wanda. Vision. Shuri. Bucky._ But the truth is, he isn’t strong enough for this. Maybe he never was.

“Seems fucked up,” Natasha snorts. He hears her rustling on the other end and he knows that she, too, is struggling with her guilt. “To be left behind and feel guilty about it.”

Steve laughs lowly, but it’s a sad, desperate, wrinkled thing. He passes a hand over his face.

“What do we do, Nat?” he asks. “Where do we go from here?”

There’s a silence so long he thinks Natasha’s finally fallen asleep. Then, the sound of rustling, again.

“Forward, Steve,” she says, quietly. “We go forward.”  
  
  
Sometimes, even when he’s awake, he sees ghosts. He doesn’t mean to. Steve isn’t the kind to linger in his memories; or, at least, he isn’t the type to forget to live where he is just to hold on to some piece of his past. It’s counterintuitive, maybe, being a man out of time. But that’s a self defense mechanism. The passage of time is already sluggish in his mind without lingering somewhere he no longer is.

Still, sometimes he’ll go to an empty deli and turn to see Sam standing behind him, arms crossed at his chest, a knowing smile playing on his lips. Sometimes, he’ll wash his face and turn, heart hammering, Bucky waiting at the door, a hand tugging at his long hair.

Once, he’s in a bar, by himself, drinking even though he he knows he can’t get drunk. He likes the motion of it. He’s done it before; drowned his sorrows at the bottom of a bottle that did nothing for him. This time, he drinks half of the bar and pays a sympathetic looking bartender.

As he’s leaving, he thinks he sees him. He’s in the corner of his vision and he whirls around. He doesn’t think, he just grabs, as hard as he can.

The man recoils from him, shouts, and tries to hit him.

Well, Steve’s a supersoldier. Sometimes he doesn’t know his own strength.

The man goes sprawling so hard. He hits his head against the pavement.

He has dark brown hair, but his eyes are green. Both of his arms are flesh. He’s all wrong—the shape of him, the feel of him.

Steve shuffles back in horror and the bartender comes out, yells at Steve to go before he calls the cops.

Steve turns and runs.  
  
  
It’s only later that he has to reconcile the burning feelings in the pit of his stomach. One—a deep, wrenching longing in his gut, missing someone like you would a limb; the other—a searing need, so hot as to be overwhelming. Steve hasn’t felt this in so long he doesn’t know what to do with it. It tingles under his skin. He wants a mouth on his own, a hand on his skin. Anyone will do.

Anyone with blue eyes and brown hair.

He tilts his head back against his headboard and closes his eyes.

He lets out a scream that no one hears.  
  
  
Natasha isn’t impressed when he calls her, two hours later.

“It’s four in the morning, Rogers,” she says. She sounds groggy. Maybe the melatonin is working, for once.

Steve shouldn’t feel jealous, but he does.

“I saw him again,” Steve says, hollowly. “I see them everywhere.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, kindly. There’s a moment as she seems to look for the words she wants in her mouth.  
  
“They’re gone, Steve,” she says. “They’re not there.”

Steve passes a hand over his eyes.

“I know,” he says miserably. “Don’t you think I know? God. I know.”

Natasha sighs.

“I love you, Rogers,” she says. “But you need to take your ass to therapy.”  
  
  
What does reality feel like, when half of everyone you love is gone?

Like absolute, utter, fucking shit.

* * * * * *

**Power.**

_2019._

The funny thing is, he’s lived in this century for almost a decade now and he still doesn’t know how to make much more than a sandwich. Before the world ended, it was because delivery was easy enough and for everything Seamless couldn’t get to him, there was the Tony Stark Delivery Service. Now that the world _has_ ended, there’s not much more incentive. Steve makes things that are easy and bland, like some kind of inheritance from his past.

“That’s sad, Rogers,” Natasha says. She’s barefoot in her kitchen and watching Steve struggle to make anything more creative than a sandwich piled with cheese and slices of deli meat.

“It’s bread and cheese and meat,” Steve says, looking down at his plate. He had even remembered mayonnaise this time.

“Did I stutter?” Natasha says with a soft smile. “Move.”

Steve frowns and moves out of the way.

Natasha’s kitchen is bigger than he would expect, but she’s full of surprises. Unlike Steve, Natasha isn’t afraid of the stove.

“What are you making?” he asks, still unwilling to abandon his sandwich.

Natasha snorts. Her red hair is growing out at the roots, in stark contrast to the bleached blonde everywhere else. Steve remembers her buying the box of dye, somewhere in Germany, just her and him and Sam in a hotel they paid handsomely for their discretion. He had watched her rinse the red into blonde. It’s ironic, in a slightly disconsolate way, to see the red coming back now. Sam isn’t here to see it this time.

“Pasta,” Natasha says. She moves around the kitchen with ease. “Can you grab the box from the top?”

Steve moves to the pantry and eyes the box of spaghetti on the topmost shelf, next to two extra boxes of cereal, a box of lasagna, and a handful of canned vegetables.

“Why is it all the way up here?” Steve asks, taking it down.

Natasha is quiet for just a moment.

“The cat couldn’t get to it,” she says.

Steve is sorry for asking.  
  
  
It’s strangely soothing, watching the water boil. Natasha instructs him when and how to put the spaghetti in so even he can’t mess it up. In the meantime, she chops onions and mushrooms on the cutting board.

“I’m thinking about moving,” Steve says.

“Yeah?” Natasha asks, looking up at him. “Where?”

Steve shrugs.

“How are your neighbors?” he asks.

A half-smile flickers across Natasha’s face.

“Quiet,” she says. “Nonexistent. Wouldn’t hate someone who’s willing to make me a sandwich in the middle of the night. Some loser keeps calling me at three in the morning and then I get real hungry.”

Steve feels something warm wash over him then. He can’t help his own smile.

“I can do that,” he says. “Peanut butter and jelly. Cut diagonally.”

“My favorite,” Natasha says quietly. She finishes the onions and mushrooms and moves to the stove next to him.

She gets the pasta sauce out and pours it into a pot, turning up the heat to medium-high.

The water boils in front of Steve and his stomach twists, dully. It’s always twisting, sometimes an ache, sometimes something sharper.

“Could we have done something?” he asks. It’s not like he hasn’t asked before. It’s the only thing he can keep asking.

“Steve,” Natasha says, admonishingly.

“When I got the serum,” Steve says, “I made a promise. To myself. To Erskine. To Bucky, wherever he was, and my Ma, rest her soul. I wanted to do something with it. Something good.”

“You have, Steve,” Natasha says. She stirs the sauce. “What more could you have done?”

Steve stirs the spaghetti listlessly.

“That’s what I keep asking myself,” he says. “We had a God, a Hulk, a witch. Two supersoldiers. What’s the point of power if you can’t use it to save the ones you care about, Nat?”

Natasha doesn’t say anything; not at first. Then she tips the onions and mushrooms into the sauce.

“Nothing exists in a vacuum,” she says. “Do you want to know what I learned in the Red Room?”

Steve frowns.

“Everything is relative. Power is relative. You have a gun and that’s power. Someone has a bigger gun and that’s more power,” she says. She stirs the pot and reaches for the salt and pepper. Steve grabs them from the spice rack and hands over the oregano too. “Thanks.”

She takes a moment to add the seasoning and then she sighs.

“There are scales of power,” she says. “You’re a supersoldier. That makes you nearly indestructible. Thanos had the gauntlet and six Infinity Stones. That makes him completely indestructible. So what does that mean? Does that mean you were never powerful to begin with?”

Steve doesn’t know. It doesn’t feel like it.

When it’s the middle of the night and he wakes up, screaming from nightmares—that moment, holding Thanos back, his strength, usually unbreakable, against Thanos, all of that heat, all of that fury, breaking against the shore—it doesn’t feel like he has any power at all.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” Steve admits.

“Turn the stove off,” Natasha instructs and Steve does so.

They don’t really talk for the next few minutes. Natasha finishes the sauce and they strain the spaghetti and dump it in. They mix it together and then she plates it.

“Wine,” she tells him and he fetches the bottle she points to from the wine rack.

They break open the bottle, a glass each, and sit across from each other at her small table, next to the large, glass doors that open onto her porch. Outside, city lights twinkle in the dark of the night.

Steve watches her.

“Your necklace,” he says.

She puts a hand to her throat, swallows. She shakes her head and puts it back under her collar.

Maybe Steve isn’t the only one seeing ghosts.

“Maybe we didn’t have power then,” Natasha says, sipping on her wine. “Not enough. But maybe we have it now.”

Steve swallows a mouthful of spaghetti and frowns.

“What do you mean?”

It’s not as though they hadn’t tried. They had. Captain Marvel—Carol Danvers—had come hurtling through the atmosphere with a spaceship, an alien, and an alive Tony Stark. Sometimes, Steve’s nightmares aren’t of Thanos and the gauntlet, but of flying through space. What would he have told himself, in the past, if he could see him now? What would he have told Bucky? _Hey Buck_ , he says in his head. _Science fiction is real and in the future I go—well, to space. To another planet. We go to another planet and we cut off the head of a mad titan and it still isn’t enough._

Natasha seems to know the direction of his thoughts because she gives him a disapproving look. She swirls the wine in her glass and takes a mouthful.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says and here, her voice quiets. “Nick—Fury, he’s gone. SHIELD, is gone. Everything is gone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t build something the world desperately needs.”

“Nat,” Steve looks at her questioningly and she gives him a wry half-smile.

“I’ve been talking to Okoye,” Natasha says. “I like her. She has some good ideas.”

*

_2022._

There are new monuments all around the world. The manpower to build them is reduced to half, or less, but humans have never waited to remember their losses. There’s one in San Francisco, one in Chicago, one in Denver, one in Houston, one in Miami, one in DC, and, of course, one in New York City. It’s in the middle of Long Island, because even at the end of the world, none of the five boroughs have any room to spare.

Steve sees her at the end of a row he has yet to finish.

It’s the middle of October and chilly. He’s wearing a brown leather jacket he’s had for years. It’s been years now; not only since the snap, but since he woke up from the ice, in a new world he could never have contemplated existing. The jacket is worn, the leather soft. He remembers, once, wearing it in the heat of Wakanda; a laugh, a soft touch, a _you’re an idiot, Steve, it’s like a hundred degrees out here_.

Funnily, she’s in a brown leather jacket too. Hers has small gold wings pinned to the front.

“Find what you’re looking for?” he asks, approaching her.

Carol turns to him with a sad half-smile. She’s shorn her hair close to her head. It’s fluffy at the top and short on the sides. Steve tries not to think too much about someone else whose hair looked like that, once.

“Not yet,” she says. “Keep hoping I won’t find it at all.”

“You’ve been here before,” Steve says. It’s not an accusation.

“I know,” Carol says softly. “And every time I hope the ending is different.”

Steve knows that hope too well. He had gone to the Bs and the Ws once and that had been enough. He’s sad, not a fucking masochist.

He follows her around the raised slabs of granite, hundreds of thousands of names etched into the stone.

“What are you doing here, Cap?” Carol asks.

He follows her past the Ns and Os. Despite her protestations, she seems to know exactly where she’s going.

“I wanted to visit a friend,” he says.

“I’m guessing you don’t mean Sergeant Barnes,” Carol says. It strikes him—not as callous, but as firm. Carol Danvers doesn’t bullshit and Steve can appreciate that.

“No,” he says.

“Ah,” Carol says.

They take a few more steps and come to a stop in front of the Rs. Steve looks up at the names stretching up, up, as high as the sky. Then he looks down and they continue that way too.

Carol seems lost in thought as she finds the name she’s looking for. She knows where it is; she has it memorized. 

> _Maria Rambeau  
>  Monica Rambeau_

They’re silent for a minute or five.

“What were they like?” he asks. He doesn’t know if it’s an appropriate question to ask, but here, between them, the silence soft and melancholy, he doesn’t think there’s a secret between them.

Two Captains; one out of time, one out of space. Steve has known Carol for—well, almost five years now.

“The best people I’ve ever known,” Carol says with a smile, tracing their names.

That hits Steve somewhere deep inside.

 _You’re the best person I’ve ever known, Buck_ , he’s said, too many times to count.

“We met in the force,” Carol says. “During basic. I was—well, a mess, I guess. A chip on my shoulders. I wanted to fly. Can you imagine? A woman wanting to fly. Scrapes all over my knees and elbows, a father I was estranged from, and my head in the clouds. Literally. Hot temper to boot. Everyone said I was crazy.”

Steve knows that feeling so well he could get drunk off of it.

“I’m guessing she didn’t,” he says.

“She didn’t,” Carol answers. “I met her and said, hi, my name is Carol Danvers and I’m gonna fly. And she said, hey, I’m Maria Rambeau. How high?”

To have someone like that in your life—someone who doesn’t say how can you do that, or how is that possible, but asks how high, or how fast, or why not?—well that’s the kind of blessing Steve never forgets to count.

“I met Bucky on the playground,” Steve says, hands in his pockets. “Was getting the shit beat out of me by some punk, I don’t know, a couple of years older than me. Got into a fight with him and Bucky saw and guess he had a death wish too, because he got in the middle. He was always getting me out of scrapes. And then I got him out of one.”

He thinks about Azzano, about Bucky lying strapped to a board. God, was that a year ago or a lifetime? Sometimes, Steve doesn’t think he can tell the difference anymore.

“That’s love, Rogers,” Carol says and Steve looks up, startled, his heart beating too fast. She smiles, almost knowingly. “There are different kinds of love, but that’s one of them. Maria was always dragging me out of places I shouldn’t have been.”

That makes Steve laugh.

“I guess we kept going back and forth after a while,” Steve says. “He’d get me out and I’d get him out and then he’d return the favor. Guess I kind of let him down at the end.”

“Hey,” Carol says and this time her tone is sharp. Her hand is at his shoulder and he looks up. “Don’t do that.”

He looks up at her, the sun glinting against blonde and he thinks, he’s never seen someone so determined.

“What’s the point of power?” Steve asks. “If something bad happens and you can’t save who you love?”

Carol’s fingers tighten on his shoulder and for a moment Steve winces. That’s a surprise in and of itself—not many people can hurt him.

But, then again, not many people are Carol Danvers.

She lets go of him and this time she cups Steve’s face with a hand.

“Listen to me,” she says and when Carol Danvers says to listen to her—well, you do. “Maybe power is doing whatever you can to stop it.”

* * * * * *

**Mind.**

_2020._

He watches the screens flicker off one by one. Rocket and Nebula disappear first, then Carol, then Rhodey. Soon, it’s just Okoye, lingering behind.

“General,” Steve says. “Was there something else?”

“We have lost everything, Captain,” Okoye says. She’s stoic and poised, T’Challa’s general. She has the kind of dignity people spend lifetimes searching for. “Not only a king and a brother, but the heart of Wakanda. Its soul. And its mind.”

Steve talks to Okoye on occasion, even when the council—or whatever it is that they’re doing, that Nat’s started—is meeting. There’s something comforting in speaking to her, a General to a Captain.

“How is M’Baku?” Natasha asks, next to Steve.

“He is a leader,” Okoye says, turning to Natasha. “But he is not T’Challa.”

And nobody is Shuri.

Okoye says her goodbyes and logs off, that distant look in her eyes that Steve knows only too well. It comes to him in the middle of the night, or at the beginning of the day, or any moment he stops too suddenly and comes crashing back into himself.  
  
  
“Let’s watch something,” Natasha says.

Steve rarely goes back to his own apartment anymore, anyway. It’s funny, being right down the hallway, but the emptiness doesn’t sit right with him. He sits in his empty apartment, with his empty hands, and sees ghosts everywhere. It’s different now, because it’s not one ghost, but all of them. He sleeps on Natasha’s couch more often than not and Natasha, knowing this is what they both need, says nothing at all. She gives him a spare blanket and a spare pillow and pretends not to notice when he goes running at two in the morning.

“Hollywood’s taken a hit since Thanos,” Steve says grimly.

Natasha rasps out a laugh at that.

“I guess he wasn’t a fan of modern cinema,” she says. “Come on. Let’s find something old to get lost in.”

Steve makes popcorn and adds garlic salt and pepper to it. Natasha opens a bag of M&Ms and adds them to the bowl. She curls up next to Steve and Steve feels some part of himself settle at the contact. Natasha is barely half his size, but her pressure against his side is a comfort. She picks up the remote and scrolls through the channels, settling on some action movie Steve has never seen before.

“Fast and the Furious,” Natasha says.

“I’ve never seen it,” Steve says lightly, although he thinks he must have heard of it, back when he had the capacity to pay attention to something else.

“It’s about car chases and found family,” Natasha says softly.

Steve turns to look at her. She avoids his eyes carefully, taking a handful of popcorn and M&Ms instead.

“They’re a group of criminals,” she says with a half-smile. “And I guess not-criminals, it depends on the movie. They come together and become everything for each other.”

Steve’s throat scratches.

“What happens?” he asks.

“They lose each other and come back together,” Natasha says. “They always find a way back to each other.”

It sits heavy in his chest, that indescribable mixture of grief and the inability to swallow past it.

“It’s just a movie, though,” Natasha picks the M&Ms out from her palm. “I guess it doesn’t work that way in real life.”

Couldn’t it, though? This is the thought that keeps him awake at night—or, one of the thoughts.

“What if there’s another way?” Steve asks.

“There is no other way, Steve,” Natasha answers.

They go around and around, like they have for the past two years. Sometimes Natasha asks and Steve answers. Sometimes they both look at Rhodey, Carol, and Okoye, hoping for something—anything. No one ever returns their look.

“But if there was,” Steve insists.

“If I could give myself for a single option—just one chance, I would,” Natasha says. Her voice is heavier than Steve likes to hear. His arm is around her shoulder, so he squeezes it, holds her close and rests his chin on top of red hair.

“Don’t say that,” Steve replies. “We don’t trade lives.”

“And look how that worked out for us,” Natasha snorts. Then she sighs. “That’s unkind. Vision was important to someone too. Anyway, you’re always trying to trade your life for everyone else’s, Rogers.”

That makes Steve half-smile. It’s not unlike something Sam would tell him, or Bucky.

“Okay, fair,” he says. “But do as I say, not as I do.”

“You’re the most frustrating person I have ever met,” Natasha complains and Steve does laugh at that.

He takes a handful of popcorn and they watch the movie in silence.

It’s not as bad as he expected, truth be told. It’s kind of mindless, but the car chases are exciting and the characters are engrossing. He likes how they work off of one another. There’s something between them deeper than need—love, maybe.

“Did we love each other, do you think?” he asks out loud.

“The Avengers?” Natasha says, making a face. She moves stray hair out of her face. “Probably. Could anyone you don’t love get under your skin half as much?”

She has a point that is undeniable.

“Nat—” Steve says. He watches the movie and sees something else instead. Maybe they didn’t have fast cars and maybe they weren’t criminals, but they were connected too—they loved each other too. It feels difficult to breathe; like he’s waterlogged, everywhere.

“We were a family, Steve,” Natasha says. Her voice is quiet, rough. Steve almost feels it against his skin. She presses a hand against the inside of his arm.

Steve hasn’t had a family in a long time.

They finish the movie and the popcorn with it. There’s silence when the end credits end.

“If I have to spend the end of the world with someone,” Steve says to Natasha. “I’m glad it’s with you.”

_2023._

“You solved for time travel,” Steve says.

Tony has been all arrogance and bluster for the entire time Steve has known him, but even he can’t hide the tired lines at the corner of his eyes. Time hasn’t been kind to any of them, but it’s settled on Tony Stark like something delicate. He’s older and he’s tired, but he has something precious to lose and that’s apparent too. His mouth is in a thin line instead of curved into a smirk. Or, at least, his smirk is a thin line it never was before.

Once upon a time, Tony Stark would have rattled off for two full minutes about the mechanics of quantum travel and the curvature of time and space, without stopping to take a breath. Now, he just looks a little sad.

“You want to know about time travel, Rogers?” Tony asks. He turns his hand so that Steve can see what he has cradled there, in his palm. It’s a colored photograph of a little girl, a softer, smaller version of himself. “This was, what, six months ago? In my mind she’s just born. But she’s almost five now and in this picture she’s six months younger than that. Somehow, in my reality, she’s all of those times and all of those ages at once. You want a time machine? I look at a picture of my daughter and it’s a time machine.”

Tony is still pure energy and nerve on the surface, but Steve can tell the difference now. He looks steady, but his hands shake. He straps the time GPS onto the back of his hand, but he thinks about the picture of his daughter.

Steve doesn’t have something like that—a memento of the deepest pieces of his heart. It makes him feel unmoored sometimes, to live in a reality that is so unchangeable, but hopes that it could remain in flux. He’s a man out of time and now he wants to change time. Scott Lang comes back, five years later, and now he’s in a white and black and red suit and the enemy isn’t something he can fight with his bare fists.

What good is a supersoldier in the quantum realm?

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small—a round compass. Inside, he has the picture memorized. She was beautiful, in life and in death, Peggy Carter. She was his North Star, for a time. Now she’s something else, maybe. Not hope, but a reminder.

 _My only regret is that you did not get to live yours,_ Peggy had told him.

Steve doesn’t know how to live a life where everything is gone. He woke up once in a new century, with nothing but his memories. Thanos snapped the gauntlet and he had to do it again.

How many times can one person find himself displaced?

He tries not to sway on his feet.

“How long have you had that with you?” Tony asks, looking over Steve’s shoulder.

“A long time,” Steve says. He closes the compass and tucks Peggy away.

“We’re going back into the past to try to change the future, Cap,” Tony says. He’s looking at Steve strangely, as though seeing someone completely new. “But what’s in the past stays in the past. You know that, right? Not because of time travel rules or anything like that, but—you know that, right? What’s gone is gone.”

“I know that,” Steve says, annoyed. “Of all people, you don’t think I know that?”

Tony puts two hands up, a peace offering.

Steve sighs and looks up at the wires and panels of the quantum portal hanging above his head.

“Tony,” he says.

“Hm?” Tony puts away the picture of Morgan and looks over at Steve.

Steve closes his eyes and then opens them.

“Do you regret this?” Steve asks.

It takes a moment for Tony to answer.

“Let me ask you this,” Tony says. “What would it take for you to live again?”

The question hits him too close to the chest. It’s something everyone has asked him, then and now—Tony, Sam, Natasha, the guys in his therapy circle.

He thinks of sleepless nights and two am runs. He thinks of making pizza with Natasha and a cold, lonely Christmas, drinking before realizing he can’t get drunk. He remembers Sam in an underwater prison and he remembers Sam, a hand on Steve’s shoulder, looking into his eyes and saying _I’m not going anywhere without you, Steve._ He remembers a chamber in a laboratory in Wakanda, touching glass separating him from the only person connecting him to both worlds he’s existed in.

 _Did we love each other?_ he had asked Natasha and she had answered easily, fingers twining into the bottom of red and blonde hair. _We were a family, Steve._

“What does the future mean to you, Cap?” Tony asks him, then.

“The possibilities are endless,” Steve says, and he means it.

“We all have our part to play,” Tony smiles and for once, it reaches his eyes. “Do I want to leave Morgan behind? Of course not. Do I regret putting everything on the line to make sure she lives in the world she was always meant to live in, with all of the possibilities it was always possible to have? Not a chance.”

That was Tony Stark for you, Steve thinks. A self-sacrificial bastard with a mind like a labyrinth and a secret heart of gold.

* * * * * *

**Space.**

_2019._

He switches to a public gym, just to surround himself with people again. It’s less successful than desired, when half of the world’s population is dust.

It’s him, in sweats and his favorite white tank top, hands wrapped in bandages, taking his frustration out on a punching bag that’s looking increasingly unsteady, when he hears someone approach him.

He turns, sweat glistening on his brows and arms, slightly out of breath, and finds her watching him.

“I know I’m in no position to judge, but I’ve been watching you for thirty minutes straight,” Natasha says. She’s in black leggings and a black sleeveless top, his hair braided and sitting across her shoulder. She has her arms crossed, her own hands wrapped.

“I didn’t hear you,” Steve says, trying to catch his breath. He wipes at his forehead and is surprised at how wet it is.

“I don’t know how you would have,” Natasha says with half a smile. “That bag insult your family?”

“Just working off some—excess energy,” Steve says, with a vague gesture.

“I can see that,” Natasha says.

They look at one another for a moment, saying nothing. It’s been a year since the unfathomable happened. A little less than a year since they traveled to a planet in the middle of the galaxy to find their last hope snapped.

What do you do when you run out of options, but not out of hope? Steve can’t untangle the briars in his thoughts anymore.

“Come on,” Natasha says and nods at him. “Hold it for me.”

Steve moves behind the punching bag and holds it for her. Natasha barely comes up to his sternum, but that doesn’t make her any less lethal. Her punches and kicks don’t have the same power his do, but they’re rapid, precise. She doesn’t use her own body the way he does, but channels her frustrations and energies carefully. It’s almost soothing watching her do this, as though she’s taking his heartache and grief and forcing it into the bag.

When she makes contact, Steve feels the reverberations ripple through him.

It’s motion and reminds him of momentum. He sees himself rattling, strapped in to a seat on a spaceship, infinity in his eyes.

“It was brighter than I thought it would be,” Steve says quietly, in between jabs.

“Hm?” Natasha looks up, rolling her shoulders.

“Space,” Steve says. “I thought—it would be dark. But it wasn’t. It was...beautiful.”

 _We’re going into the future_ , Bucky told him once. _Isn’t it beautiful, pal?_

Bucky had always been the more adventurous of the two of them. Steve remembers an entire childhood of science fiction pulps he barely understood, the look on Bucky’s face when he looked up at the sky, contemplating the worlds above them. He remembers the Stark Expo, Bucky a day away from shipping off and still taking this for himself—for them. He had wanted a future for both of them. And here Steve was, time traveler, space conqueror, and with dust in his palms.

“I thought I was going to throw up,” Natasha admits and that makes Steve smile.

“What would you do?” Steve asks as Natasha unwraps and rewraps her hands. “If you could again—if you had all the space and time in the world?”

It’s a strange question, but it’s on his mind. Steve lies awake at night and wonders just this—not power or responsibility, but simply, time. If he had all of that in the palm of his hands, what would he do with it?

Is it selfish that he remembers red lips and a dance unfulfilled? Is it selfish that he wants to see the colors of space in wide, slate blue eyes?

“I would change everything,” Natasha says, finally.

“About what happened?” Steve asks, with a frown.

Natasha snorts and gives up on her wraps. She sighs and begins unraveling them.

“No,” she says. “About...everything. I would get there before Thanos did. I would give us another chance.”

Steve tips his face up toward the gym ceiling. Maybe he is being selfish.

“Do you want me to ask you the same question in return?” Natasha asks, eyebrow raised.

She knows him entirely too well.

“Not really,” Steve shakes his head.

If he’s going to be selfish, he’s going to allow that to himself, in private.

“Steve,” Natasha says and her tone is sharp. He looks at her and she has on an expression that’s as soft as it is unreadable. “I know you have a complicated relationship with time and space. Moreso than most of us. But you belong here—with us. Those who have left and those who remain. You know that, right?”

Does he?

He remembers touching Wakandan ground, dust ground into leaves.

“I know, Nat,” Steve says and swallows salt and iron. “That doesn’t make it easy.”

“None of this is easy, Steve,” Natasha says, her hand on his arm. “You don’t have to be out of time for that.”

Steve knows she’s right. He shakes his head, and then nods.

“Want to get a smoothie?” he asks.

She gives him a light squeeze.

“Yeah,” she says. “Let me go shower first.”

_2023._

It’s different than what he expected, although he couldn’t say what he expected, really. He’s never been to Asgard, only seen pictures in books and imagined it in his head when Thor’s gotten drunk and talked about it. But this—it’s a kingdom repurposed into a fishing village. There’s nothing wrong with that, although he’s surprised to find Thor with his arms in the nets.

“What are you, the king of fish?” Steve calls out.

From the front of the ship, Thor looks up. He squints for a moment and then relaxes when he sees Steve. He looks different than he had when they started this whole thing. He’s still carrying weight, but he’s tanned, as though he’s been out in the sun relentlessly, his hair brushed, his long beard in a Norse braid.

“Yes,” Thor calls back. “Have you come for one?”

Steve grins and Thor motions for him to take the ramp up.

“You seem quite at ease here, Captain,” Thor says, helping Steve clamber over the edge.

“You’d be surprised how much time I’ve spent at the docks,” Steve says with a smile. “Bucky—you remember Bucky, my friend? He used to work on boats when we were younger. I was always hanging around, trying to catch his attention.”

“And did you?” Thor asks, knowingly.

“Guess I always had it,” Steve says.

Thor claps his hand on Steve’s shoulder and Steve feels something lift that he hadn’t realized had been weighing heavily on him.

“How are you, Thor?” Steve asks. “You look...better.”

Thor claps his belly with a hand and laughs.

“Do I? It seems I have some ways to go.”

“Not that,” Steve says. “You look...if not happier, then lighter. Better than before.”

“Ah,” Thor says and lets go of Steve. He looks up at the sky. There are gulls flying above them. “I don’t know about that.”

Steve knows what he means. Here, at the end of the word, or beyond the end of the world, it’s hard to reconcile what he knows with what they lost and with what they gained back. Trauma isn’t linear, it’s cyclical. They won the war and Steve’s still not sure if he lost some of himself in the process.

Thor has looked haunted for a long time. Steve has been so in his own grief, he hasn’t taken the time to talk to him about it.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “We all lost something, but you lost more than most. We let you deal with that by yourself and that’s on me.”

Thor looks at Steve as though he’s never heard anything more astonishing.

“On you?” he says. “I was not sitting here, waiting to be rescued.”

“I think we were all waiting to be rescued,” Steve says with a slow exhale. “But we should have at least been here for you. Helped you carry that burden. Friendly faces.”

“Ah, Captain,” Thor sighs. He looks older then, Thor. Steve forgets, sometimes, that he’s a God of thousands of years and whole lifetimes of memories. “No one could have helped me carry that burden. It is mine to carry alone.”

Steve gives him a half smile.

“We all had our burdens,” he says. “But we could have done a better job of carrying them together.”

Thor laughs at that.

“I suppose you are right,” he says. “Come, let me show you around my ship.”  
  
  
Thor isn’t planning on becoming a pirate, of course, but it is kind of amusing to see him explain ships and cargo and the sea to Steve. He takes to the topic with so much enthusiasm that Steve almost doesn’t notice the way his hand trembles when he’s touching the top of the steering wheel.

“Are you okay, Thor?” Steve asks, again.

This time, Thor pauses.

“Would you care for a drink?” he asks.

“Do you have any of that Asgardian stuff?” Steve says with a smile.

“I have just the thing,” Thor says, eyes twinkling.  
  
  
They stand by the railing, watching New Asgard bustle in the middle of grass and cliffs, just beyond the dock. The water rustles around them, the birds calling to each other through the air. There are birds again, and fish. Life, Steve thinks. It’s miraculous.

“I do not know if I will ever carry it any less heavily,” Thor says, bringing the bottle to his mouth.

“What’s that?” Steve asks. He takes a sip too.

“Grief. Loss,” Thor says. “My people have come back, but that does not change what they have lost. Five years ago, we had escaped Ragnarok and thought to make peace and life here, on Midgard. Things happened in the middle—terrible things—but now it is the same it was then. We are a people with a new land, a new home, but I have still lost my old one. I have still lost the people I loved the most, Steve.”

Steve—God, well doesn’t that just make him sway on his feet. If anyone knows what it’s like to lose a home, to lose everything and everyone he’s loved, isn’t it Steve?

Thor’s depression rolls off of him and Steve remembers that too. It’s not a foreign feeling to him; waking up in the middle of the night, feeling as though there’s an anvil pressed against his chest. Some mornings he woke up—still wakes up—feeling as though his every muscle and bone has turned to lead. What’s the difference between blocking your feelings at the gym, hours and hours of physical abuse, and finding that numbness at the bottom of a bottle of liquor?

“Thor,” Steve says.

Thor turns to him, curiously. The breeze rustles his hair, the braid in his beard. He does look out of time this time—a Norse God of old, somehow in the middle of the 21st Century.

“I need to tell you something,” Steve says. “When Tony and Scott went back to get the tesseract—they failed the first time around. Everything got messed up and—he got it. He ended up with it.”

Thor straightens.

“Who?” he asks, intently.

“Loki,” Steve says, looking at his friend. “Your brother got the tesseract in 2012 and disappeared.”  
  
  
It’s night by the time they finish drinking, talking into the cool sea breeze, the water buffeting against the gently rocking ship.

“I will go after him,” Thor says, his eyes bright.

“What about all of this?” Steve asks, nodding toward the quietly setting village of New Asgard.

“They are my people and always will be,” Thor says with a smile. “But it is time for someone else to lead them.”

Steve understands that too. He feels a knot in his chest loosen.

“It’s time for you to find your peace,” Steve says.

Thor laughs, almost loudly.

“It is time for me to find my brother, Captain,” Thor says.

That makes Steve smile, it really does. He bumps shoulders with Thor and they watch a silhouette in a lit doorway a little ways off into the village. Steve knows her now too—Valkyrie.

“You’ll always be their king,” Steve says, quietly.

Thor doesn’t say anything for a long time. When he does, it’s warm and a little watery around the edges.

“They will always be my people.”

* * * * * *

**Time.**

_2022._

The funny thing about grief is that it never fully goes away, but it settles easier, after a while, time smoothing out edges that start out sharp and aching. He doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night gasping for breath anymore, but it doesn’t leave him either. It’s like a splinter under his skin, unnoticed until he stops to look at it. When he closes his eyes it still aches, but when he opens them, the sun is shining and the people who are gone are gone and those who remain behind stand in front of him, solid, if not whole.

 _The world moves on_ , he thinks, often. _But not us._

He finds a group of survivors, all suffering from the same, gnawing guilt, all trying to find a way to continue on through holes that have been left behind.

“I went on a date for the first time since—” one survivor says.

“I started college,” another says. “I thought about the future and it was—okay. Not easy, but okay.”

Steve tells Natasha about his group, sometimes, not revealing confidences, but sharing stories. He wants to find his own resiliency in other people’s lives, but she tells him that’s not how it works.

“They have their own paths, Steve,” Natasha says.

The two of them stand against the edge of the Bow Bridge in the middle of Central Park on a bright, sunny day. Natasha’s hair is down, waves of red and blonde against her thin shoulders. She leans forward, tossing crumbs to the few duck that remain in the lake.

“You lose people and you think you’ll never survive this—living without them,” Steve says. He looks down into the water, two ducks fighting over crumbs of bread. “Then a year passes, then two. It’s been four years since Thanos and people are moving on.”

“They have to,” Natasha says. “Humans don’t have a choice.”

That doesn’t sit as easily with Steve as it once did. Didn’t he already do this once? He woke up in 2011 without a single person in the world he still knew. He lost his best friend. He lost his girl. He lost his entire world. He had moved on then, but it seems too much to ask for him to move on a second time. How many times can one person suffer the loss of everything in one lifetime?

“It feels like a loose end, I guess,” Steve says. He presses close to Natasha and she looks over at him with that warm, half-smile she’s capable of giving. “There’s no reason to think there’s anything more we can do. But we’re the Avengers; or those that are left. I’m a supersoldier. We know Gods and aliens. You have a talking raccoon who reports to you.”

“He emails me way too much,” Natasha mutters.

“How is it, in a world of such impossibility,” Steve says with a rare smile, “that we’ve run out of options?”

Natasha shrugs. She raises a hand to her throat, her fingers touching a necklace she has worn, in the entire time Steve has known her—an arrow on a chain.

“We got a chance they didn’t, Steve,” Natasha says. “We lost all these people in one fell swoop. Maybe we get them back, maybe we don’t. Maybe we die searching for some answer that isn’t there. Does it matter? This is our chance. A second chance.”

“What do you want to do with that?” Steve asks, nudging her. “Anything in the world.”

“Become a figure skater,” Natasha grins. “No, I’m joking. I want to try. If that’s all my second chance is—just trying, until the very end, I think that’s what I’m willing to do.”

Steve doesn’t think he’s felt this, in a very, very long time—the kind of glowing, protective love he has for his friend.

“I wish I had taken the chance to tell people how I felt,” Steve says. “I wish they had known how much I cared.”

He thinks about all of the times he’s lost someone before he’s gotten a chance to tell them, and the instances stack up deep in his chest. He remembers fingers just beyond his reach, down the side of a train into the crevices of a snowy mountain, a body on a slab of stone in Austria, shocked, angry eyes staring down at him as a ship falls out of the sky and into the Potomac. He thinks about red lips and a dance he never got.

He wonders: the last time he put his arms around Bucky, did he know he meant it?

He thinks: how many times can you lose a person before you stop expecting them to come back?

“They knew, Steve,” Natasha says. And then, quieter. “Barnes knew.”

Steve lets out a shaky laugh.

“There was never any time,” he says. “When he was recovering and we were—on the run. We talked sometimes. FaceTime—really helpful. But I never visited him enough. I should have gone as much as I could. I should have checked on him. I should have _stayed_.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, a warning in her voice. She leans against the railing and then tangles her small hand in his own. “We can’t do that. It doesn’t help to look back and say, _what if_?”

“I just—” Steve swallows, a lump in his throat. “I thought we had more time.”

Natasha leans against him, first her side, then her head.

“I know,” she says. “We all did.”

“If I could go back, I’d do it,” Steve says thickly. “I’d stay.”

Natasha doesn’t say anything for a long time.

They watch the ducks float away, Steve lost in his thoughts, and Natasha playing with her arrow.

_1970._

What does time mean to someone who has existed beyond it? Scott Lang tells them time travel exists and they try. God, they try. Everything almost goes perfectly, just until it doesn’t.

Then Tony has an idea—a last ditch attempt to right everything, a Hail Mary at the end of the world.

Steve’s heart beats in his throat.

“Do you trust me?” Tony Stark asks.

It’s an easy question to answer. He’s always believed in Howard Stark’s son, even if he hasn’t always agreed with him.

“I do,” Steve says and they both set their time GPS devices, much to Scott Lang’s confusion.

“One chance, Cap,” Tony says.

What’s once chance between saving everything you’ve ever known and being lost to time, forever? Steve has already lived that reality, time and time again. He’s not afraid, only a little nervous.

 

The thing about the past no one tells you is that—it’s the past. But for someone like Steve, whose past was his present and whose present is his future, standing in the middle of a year he missed the first time around isn’t only disconcerting, it’s jarring.

He goes through the hallways at Camp Lehigh in a daze, a ghost in an era that knew him, but that he, himself, has never known. It’s strange, to be so far removed from a time that it’s the past for you, even though it would have been your future. He sees old phones and monitors, technology he’s never seen before, but knows are outdated by far. Does he feel more at home here than he has in the future? He doesn’t think so. It’s all foreign.

Tony goes to find the tesseract and Steve’s left to grab the Pym particles. He almost gets away with it, but he sees the woman from the elevator calling in the cavalry, so he slips into the first door he sees, heart beating fast. There’s good adrenaline and there’s bad. This doesn’t seem particularly fun.

He looks around him, door closed behind. When he finds the picture of himself, he experiences something external—an out-of-body experience; a fever dream or deja vu. He picks up the frame, but doesn’t have to look around to know where he is.

He sets the picture down and looks up.

What do you do when you’re given a second chance?

In 1945, Steve takes the Valkyrie and crashes it into the Atlantic. The last person he hears is Peggy Carter. The last thing he thinks about is the Stork Club. The last thing he remembers is blue eyes and an outstretched hand, not along the side of a train, but at another club, someone who always took him dancing.

In front of him, through the glass, is at least one of his ghosts.

She’s 25 years older than she had been—not the last time he saw her, but the last time he saw her in his _past_. Her hair is greying and she has wrinkles where there used to be none, but she’s all grace, dignity, and authority, Peggy Carter.

How does it feel to see someone you thought might be meant for you once, again, in front of you—the same, but different?

To Steve, it feels a little bit like dying, all over again. He watches her talk to a SHIELD agent. He watches the shape of her mouth and the corners of her smile. She is every bit the commander he remembers her to be.

The thing about feelings is, sometimes they fade and sometimes they threaten to engulf you. Here, Steve feels both at the same time. His chest aches with it—what could have been and what is.

He shifts and sees a different shelf in Peggy’s office; another bookshelf of pictures. This time, it isn’t only Peggy. It’s Peggy and her life—her and her colleagues, her and her friends, her and her husband. Little ones who look like the perfect mixture of her and someone else—someone who Steve doesn’t know, but who he can see, clearly, she looks happy to be with.

There are different kinds of love in this world and they all change, with time. Love is dynamic—love isn’t stagnant.

Once, Peggy Carter had loved Steve Rogers and once, Steve Rogers had loved her back.

He still does, in a way, but he’s not in those pictures and there’s a reason for that.

He picks it up, traces her and her husband and puts it back. The time GPS jostles as he does so.

 _People move on_ , Steve had said, to Natasha. _But not us._

That’s true and it isn’t.

He’s in 1970 and in 2023, both at the same time.

Here, with his past and his future laid before him, a confluence of events and _what ifs_ that will solely exist in his memories, he knows this to be true—that Peggy Carter lived a good, long, fulfilled life.

She had found her person and made her home.

It feels like—not a closed door, but a spray of medicine when his lungs stop working. He takes a deep, shaky breath and steps back from the window.

He’s said goodbye to her once and he’ll do it again.

The thing is, Steve has a home too. And maybe his person isn’t the person he thought it would be—but maybe it was the person he had had all along.

Steve Rogers is 105 going on 39 and he knows this to be true: he loves Peggy Carter and he always will. But some loves change and others don’t.

He will help gather the stones, recreate the power of the gauntlet, and bring back everyone Thanos killed.

He will go home.

He will, he thinks, find his person too.

_2023._

At the beginning and end of time is this: a pure moment of clarity, in defeat or triumph.

Steve sees the destruction around him, the army laid out before them—miles and miles of enemy. He’s battered. He’s tired.

He holds Mjolnir in one hand and his broken shield in the other. He takes in a breath and thinks: maybe this is the end of all things, but I do not go without fighting for my home.

Steve feels it deep in his chest, how right this one thing is.

If they die, they die fighting.

Here, at the end, time wrinkles.

A crackle, through the air, a scratchy voice he hasn’t heard in five years.

There’s a beat where his heart used to be.

 _Hey Cap_ , it says. _Cap_.

Steve stops. Everything in him stutters—his heart, his head, his reality, his space. His time.

 _Cap_ , Sam says. _On your left._

* * * * * *

**Soul.**

_2023._

There’s a minute before the launch. Everyone has the jitters, which is just as well. It’s not everyday someone you work with builds a time machine that could either save most of humanity or get you stuck in an endless, feckless loop.

Natasha looks down and then back up at Steve.

“How do I look?” she says.

“It goes with your hair,” Steve says, smiling. It’s nothing genuine, all nerves, but it makes Natasha go soft around the edges.

“Just call me a—what was it? Instagram influencer?” she says.

“I don’t know what those words mean,” Steve stares at her and she barks out light laughter.

She watches as Steve examines his suit. He usually has nerves of steel but for this mission, he’s almost beside himself. Too much depends on this. It’s all or nothing. And Steve Rogers has never accepted nothing.

“It’s going to work, Steve,” Natasha says. “Everything is going to be all right. We’re going to get them back.”

Steve nods and looks at his reflection in a reflective surface.

“We’re going to get him back,” Natasha says softly.

That makes Steve feel—if not soft, then something a little mushy. He’s spent so many years chasing this one person, only to lose him again. This time, if he gets him back, he won’t let him go. This time, he won’t let them lose each other.

“Nat,” Steve says, before she turns to leave to join the rest of the team at the quantum machine.

“Yeah?” Natasha says. She looks back at him. Standing there, silhouetted against the doorway, Steve remembers meeting her for the first time, years and lifetimes ago now. He had taken time to trust her and he’s never regretted that. He’s never regretted knowing her since.

“You’re the only family I have left,” Steve says. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that. You, Natasha Romanoff, are my family. That’s enough for me.”

Natasha looks slight in that doorway, a smudge of a person he knows and has come to love. Because this is true, too: that Steve Rogers loves her, in a way he doesn’t love anyone else. Love is personal, in that way.

“You’re my family too, Steve,” Natasha says. “You’re a pain in my ass, and that’s why I know I love you.”  
  
They don’t hug before they enter the quantum tunnel.

Later, Steve thinks. We’ll have time, later.

_2023._

The rest of them come back, but she doesn’t.

He looks, once, at Clint’s angry, broken face and the way he holds the stone, as though it’s taken something from him to grasp it, and he knows there’s no going back from this. It’s fitting, in a way he will never recover from, that she, their soul, would give her life for a stone of that name.

Once, a lifetime ago, someone he loved had told him that it was Bucky’s decision, to follow him, to lose his life for him. It hadn’t made him feel better, but it had given him the strength he needed to move with momentum, to keep from buckling under the weight of loss. You don’t get that, in the middle of war—you don’t get to buckle.

This was her decision too, to give up what she held for the family she had grown to love.

But the thing with family is, you don’t just leave them behind. Death could not take Natasha Romanoff from Steve Rogers.

He sways with the weight of it, the hollow left behind by loss and the anger that kicks into place after. Determination, maybe, or refusal. They’re in the middle of a war now, too. There’s never any time to look at your hands and wonder where someone has disappeared to, in a war.

Thor says they should go back for her and Clint says they can’t.

Steve, he says nothing. He sits with her memory—five years of nights spent talking quietly together until morning, holding onto one another if not physically, then metaphorically. What he remembers aren’t the moments of hopelessness, but the opposite: Natasha’s cooking, movies on her couch, her smile, her hand in his hair when he thought he could move no longer. _Get your ass to therapy, Rogers_ , Natasha had said, and Steve had.

Natasha had saved him. Maybe she hadn’t known it and maybe he hadn’t known it himself, but that didn’t make it any less true. At the end of the world, they had found only each other and it had almost been just enough.  
  
  
They gather all the Infinity Stones into a gauntlet of Tony’s making, because they’re in the middle of a war.

It’s not time yet, he thinks.

But it will be, before all was said and done.

_2023._

This part has never been easy. Wars come and wars go, but the people who are left behind, battered and ruined, they stay with those memories forever.

He’s never seen eye-to-eye with Tony, but that doesn’t mean as much as it once did. _Proof that Tony Stark Has a Heart_ , it says on his old reactor. Pepper puts it in the middle of a wreath of flowers and sets it at the edge of the water.

The current takes it farther out and Steve watches it go. In front of him, there are the people Tony left behind—Pepper, Morgan, Rhodey, Happy. Around him, there are the people Tony had meant something to—the Avengers, the non-Avengers, people lost and come back because of one man’s sacrifice.

This is war, Steve thinks.

He’s been in more wars than one person could possibly bear. He’s lost more people than he can possibly list. He’s the soldier they made and something more too. At the center of this, at the center of him, he’s not Captain America—he’s Steve Rogers. And here, Steve Rogers has lost someone too. A colleague. A friend.  
  
  
He throat sticks.

It doesn’t make it easier.

He says goodbye to Tony Stark and turns to pick up the pieces left behind.  
  
  
“Do you remember when you found me?” Bucky says, his voice low.

Next to him, his best friend, the person he keeps losing and finding. Bucky has his hands in his pockets, his hair cut to his shoulders. It’s been five years since Steve has seen anything but a ghost of him and he hasn’t changed a day. Death has been good to Bucky Barnes.

Steve keeps his hands to himself, because he doesn’t know what else to do with them. He vibrates with the need to reach forward and he’s too scared to do just that.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “You looked like—a corpse on a stone slab.”

Bucky smiles at that. Steve watches him, not because he knows how to, but because he can’t look away—not anymore.

“I thought you were a ghost,” Bucky says. “I thought I had lost what was left of my mind.”

“Buck,” Steve says. He sways on his feet. He can’t keep standing under the weight of what he’s left with—Tony, gone, Natasha, gone. They’ve won the war, but he lost the battle. He’s tired. Steve Rogers is tired.

“Steve,” Bucky says and turns to look at him. “Every time I have died, I’ve thought only of you.”

What does Steve say to that?

What does he have left to say?

“We have to put the stones back,” Steve says, quietly. “Bruce told the timekeeper we would. If we don’t, the time stream—”

“I know,” Bucky says, and for a moment he almost seems angry. He grows to twice his size and then he shrinks back down. Five years and he still has a metal arm, but he’s smaller than what Steve remembers. He feels the irrational need to feed him. “You think I don’t know that? I know what you’re planning on doing, punk.”

“What?” Steve asks, surprised. “I don’t even know what I’m planning on doing.”

“You idiot,” Bucky says. “You’re the biggest moron I’ve ever met.”

“Bucky Barnes,” Steve says, frowning, and he feels a thrill of pleasure when Bucky laughs at that.

“I know you, Stevie Rogers,” Bucky says. He looks—God, it’s not that the smile looks good on him, it’s that everything does.

Maybe it hasn’t caught up to Steve, that he’s here. For five years he’s hunted a memory and now, in front of him, after years and years of pure loneliness, it’s the one person he’s never been able to live without.

“Whatever you do,” Bucky says, catching Steve’s eye and keeping it. “I want you to do it with me.”

That confuses Steve. He had been thinking about Sam, standing by the water, comforting Rhodey, but now his attention snaps back to Bucky.

“Maybe I don’t have any right to do this,” Bucky says softly. “But I’m going to ask anyway.”

“Buck,” Steve says and he feels it weigh on his chest. It sits there, the truth and the unbearableness of it all.

Bucky’s hand is on his shoulder, a firm weight anchoring him here, to the now, to this time, this timeline. Then Bucky’s hand on his cheek. Then Bucky’s hand in his hair.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. “I’ve left you so many times, maybe I’ve lost all right to ask.”

“Ask,” Steve says, his throat thick. “Whatever it is—ask me.”

“Stay,” Bucky says, after a moment. “Will you stay, Steve? Will you stay, for me?”  
  
  
“Are you sure about this?” Bucky asks. He’s surprised, which is fair, because Steve is too.

He hadn’t meant to do it. He had watched Tony float away and thought—this feels right too.

He closes the compass, Peggy’s picture shut tight inside. He feels too large and too small, at once. Steve Rogers—isn’t that all he’s ever been?

He bends down to the water’s edge and sets the compass down.

He lets it go.  
  
  
“I know she meant a lot to you, Steve,” Bucky says, quietly, after a few minutes.

“She always will,” Steve says, closing his eyes.

He knows this to be true. He will always, until his dying day, love Peggy Carter, in some way.

“She got her peace, Bucky,” Steve says. He opens his eyes. “Not it’s time for me to try to find mine.”

Bucky watches him closely—too closely. It makes Steve feel as though something is crawling across his skin. Is he too seen or not seen enough? Which one does he want?

“I think I’m done,” Steve says.

“What?” Bucky replies, startled.

“Yeah.” Steve smiles. No. Steve _smiles_. He looks over at Sam again. “Yeah, Buck. I think I’m ready for something more.”

“You really know how to surprise me, Rogers,” Bucky says after a moment.

It’s nearly night now. People are milling about outside near the water still, but also inside, where there’s food and memories. Tony left behind a hologram or, something.

Steve feels loose now. He feels free; as though he could just float away on a cloud.

“Yeah?” he grins and turns.

There, in front of him, Bucky Barnes—an expression on his face like. _Shit. Yeah, this is it. I can’t fucking believe it, but this is the one._ Or. _I still can’t believe it was you all along, you punk. _Or maybe. _For better or worse. Life or a hundred deaths. He’s the one._ __

“Yeah,” Bucky says, softly. Then he lets out a soft exhale of a laugh. “God. I’ve missed you.”

Steve’s chest is tight.

“I missed you,” he says and steps closer. “I missed you so much—every second, of every day. I did everything I could to bring you back and now you’re—”

“Here,” Bucky says, quietly. Steve’s hand is in his hair this time. “I’m here.”

Steve doesn’t cry, but he feels as though he could.

He cups Bucky’s face, leans forward, and kisses him.

* * * * * *

**After.**

“Suit up,” Steve says.

“Idiot,” Bucky replies, fondly. “We’re already in suits.”

“Yeah,” Steve grins. “I just like saying it.”

They’re in the ringed center of the new quantum portal. Bucky looks good in a customized red-white-and-black suit, if Steve’s going to be honest. His hair is free and for the first time in—years—he looks carefree too. Excited, even.

 _Time travel?_ Bucky had exclaimed, eyes wide, nearly vibrating out of his damn skin. _Are you shitting me?_

Steve catches him once by the wrist and kisses him again, right there in the open, for God and everyone to see.

“Five years harassing me in the Soul Stone and the second he gets out, he already has a boyfriend,” Sam says from the sidelines. “Unbelievable.”

He has a shield on his arm.

Steve feels no loss. He feels—pride. He feels peace.

Bucky takes his hand and he feels something else too—happiness.

He remembers a walk along the lake, long after the memorial is well and truly done.

 _Steve,_ Bucky had said. _Did you love her? Was she your family too?_

Steve had nodded.

 _Then, pal_ , Bucky had said, hand on Steve’s chest, pushing on the place his heart is. _You gotta go back for her. You don’t leave family behind. Nothing else to it._

“You get her back, Cap,” Clint says. He looks—angry and determined. “You tell her to stop being a self-sacrificial asshole and you tell her to come home.”

“He’s good at that,” Bucky says, next to him. He nestles his face into Steve’s shoulder and Steve’s heart lifts. “He’s good at bringing people home.”

“I was never going to leave her behind,” Steve says and lifts the case with the stones. “She can kick my ass for it later.”

“All right, Cap!” Scott calls from behind a console of buttons. “We’ll see you in a few seconds.”

Steve nods at him. Bucky, next to him, holds steadfast onto his hand.

Scott counts down and there’s a tug and a zap and then—they’re gone.

*

His hand is on her shoulder, before she takes those steps up to the top of the mountain. Around them, purple and pink, stars strewn across infinity.

“Natasha,” Steve breathes out, his chest beating painfully in his chest.

“Steve,” Natasha says, and turns around.

 _lights will guide you home;_  
_and ignite your bones;_  
_and I will try to fix you_

**Author's Note:**

> \+ Thank you so much for reading. Let me know how you felt. ♥
> 
> \+ I worked through a lot of feelings after Endgame and this was a result. Is it cheesy to say it's my love letter to Steve Rogers? I usually write rom coms, so I guess cheese is my brand. 
> 
> \+ Title from "Fix You" by Coldplay, obviously.
> 
> \+ Rebloggable on Tumblr [here](https://spacerenegades.tumblr.com/post/184606853158/an-avengers-endgame-stucky-fix-itfill-it) and RTable on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades/status/1124075388924243970).
> 
> \+ Come yell with me on [@spacerenegades [twitter]](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades). ♥


End file.
